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Burlington Telecom is offering 1Gb symmetrical service in Burlington,VT for $150/month; which is quite a bit more expensive than the Google Fiber in Kansas City, but Burlington is a much smaller town.

I've started an initiative called BTV Gig with the goal of leveraging gigabit Internet speeds for the benefit of the community of Burlington, Vermont. If you haven't already heard of it, you may want to check it out. We had a Gigabit Salon last month with over 30 people sharing ideas on how we can leverage this network to benefit our community. We're working on a report documenting how we can take this initiative forward and have some other events in the works.

While Google Fiber is getting most of the attention, Kansas City isn't the only place with gigabit Internet speeds. Chattanooga, Tennessee and Burlington, Vermont (my city) both have gigabit Internet via fiber-to-the-home as well as a few other places around the country. I've started an initiative in Burlington called BTV Gig (http://btvgig.org/) to try and bring attention to this and decide how our community is going to leverage gigabit.

I am a Vermont resident (although not in your district). Vermont is a state with a citizen legislature, meaning that it is comprised primarily of citizens who have jobs outside of being a legislator. From a citizen legislature, direct democracy a logical next step on the continuum of representational democracy. However, is direct democracy too much of a leap for legislative bodies that are currently made up of professional legislators? Aren't there some benefits to having a professional legislature? For example, professional legislators can spend more time understanding the domains behind individual issues. Do you agree with this assessment?

What do you suppose the ASF would do? The Apache Software Foundation hosts projects that meet certain standards, but they do not manage any of the projects themselves.

When I said, "reach out to the Apache project itself" I meant sending an email to the CouchDB project's mailing list or otherwise contacting contributors to the Apache CouchDB project. I didn't mean contacting the ASF.

It would be interesting to hear more from Canonical about what specific issues they ran into. They say that they worked with "the company behind CouchDB." While Couchbase is one company "behind" the project, CouchDB itself is an Apache project. Did they reach out to the Apache project itself? Also, why build something completely new rather than provide patches to existing software? I'm sure they had good reasons, but I'd like to hear some more details about what did and didn't work for them.

mysqlrocks writes "As Tropical Storm Irene swamped Vermont state offices with flooding of epic proportions, IT staff took it upon themselves to save critical servers. At the same time, their cars left in the parking lot were lost to the flooding. From the article:

Two AHS employees —network administrator Andrew Matt and deputy chief information officer Darin Prail — parked their cars behind the AHS building at around 6 p.m. that Sunday, August 28, and rushed in to save the equipment. When they came back outside, giant trees were floating by and the entire parking lot was under water. So were their cars.

mysqlrocks writes "In Vermont, FairPoint Communications has enlisted draft horses to help lay fiber-optic cable in remote locations. Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin has pledged to bring bring broadband to every last mile by 2013, including many remote areas that have been neglected in the past. Private companies have been unwilling to invest in the expensive infrastructure needed to reach these areas. However, Vermont's congressional delegation helped to secure $410 million in federal money earmarked for broadband development and Vermont has partnered with private companies, like FairPoint, to bring high-speed Internet access to all Vermonters.

From the article:

The difficulty of getting cable to "every last mile," is where Fred, the cable-carrying draft horse, comes in.

"Hopefully it pays off," says Hastings.

"We could maybe get a four-wheeler in here," he continues, gesturing to the cleared swath of boggy, fern-studded terrain that he's working in today. But definitely not a truck, and Fred's impact is nearly invisible. Residents rarely complain about a draft horse tromping through their yards.

Several citizens from Burlington, Vermont have contacted Google about this for our city. Someone on the City Council has asked the mayor to approach Google, as well. We actually already have a municipal fiber-optic network, Burlington Telecom. However, they are currently experiencing financial troubles and the City is considering bringing in an outside investor or partner. Google, if you want to come here we've already got the fiber in the ground. Let's talk;)